The United States killed six men aboard a boat in international waters “just off the Coast of Venezuela,” President Trump wrote on social media on Tuesday, asserting without evidence that they had been transporting drugs.
The strike was the fifth known attack by the U.S. military on such boats since Sept. 2. The military has now killed 27 people as if they were enemy soldiers in a war zone and not criminal suspects.
“Intelligence confirmed the vessel was trafficking narcotics, was associated with illicit narcoterrorist networks, and was transiting along a known” route for smuggling, Mr. Trump said in his social media post.
He also posted a 33-second aerial surveillance video showing a small boat floating, and then being struck by a missile and exploding. Unlike some previous announcements, the president did not identify the nationality of the people who were killed or name a specific drug cartel or criminal gang with which they were supposedly associated.
Since Mr. Trump and his defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, started the operation last month, a broad range of legal specialists have called the premeditated and summary extrajudicial killings illegal. They noted that the military cannot lawfully target civilians — even criminal suspects — who do not pose a threat in the moment and are not directly participating in hostilities.
The Trump administration has asserted that killing suspected drug smugglers — rather than having the Coast Guard interdict boats and arrest people aboard them if suspicions of drug smuggling proved accurate, as countries like the United States traditionally deal with the problem — are consistent with the laws of war.
But the administration has not released any detailed legal analysis in support of that conclusion. Charles L. Young III, Mr. Trump’s nominee to be general counsel of the Army, said last week that he had seen a memo by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel about the operation but declined to disclose its legal analysis or arguments.
The administration’s public explanations have nodded toward different legal concepts and terms without explaining why they apply to suspected drug smuggling. For example, Mr. Trump last month signed a letter to Congress informing lawmakers of the Sept. 2 strike, which he said had killed 11 people aboard a boat as a matter of “self-defense.”
After a strike on Sept. 15 killed three people, the administration sent a different kind of notice to Congress declaring that Mr. Trump had “determined” that the United States was now in a formal armed conflict with various Latin American cartels and gangs that his team had labeled “terrorists.” Suspected drug runners for them could be lawfully targeted as “unlawful combatants,” the administration wrote.
But it has not explained how a boat in the southern Caribbean Sea, far from the U.S. coast, posed the kind of imminent threat of armed attack that could prompt a right to use force in self-defense.
Nor has the administration explained how smuggling an illicit consumer product counted as the sort of hostilities that, under international law, shift to armed-conflict rules from human rights ones. In peacetime, the authorities arrested criminal suspects; in war, it is lawful to target enemy fighters based on their status rather than any threat they pose in the moment.
In his posting on Tuesday, Mr. Trump did not mention self-defense or a purported state of armed conflict. Instead, the president invoked his constitutional role as the head of the U.S. armed forces without further discussion, saying he had authorized Mr. Hegseth, whom he calls the secretary of war, to order the strike.
“Under my Standing Authorities as Commander-in-Chief, this morning, the Secretary of War, ordered a lethal kinetic strike on a vessel affiliated with a Designated Terrorist Organization (DTO) conducting narcotrafficking in the USSOUTHCOM area of responsibility,” Mr. Trump wrote, “just off the Coast of Venezuela.”
Charlie Savage writes about national security and legal policy for The Times.
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